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It has been one of those weeks where three different people sent me the same article and none of them read it. |
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The blue dye tongue test for supertasters does not actually work |
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There is a beloved home experiment where you swab your tongue with blue food dye, count the pale bumps that stand out inside a small paper circle, and use the count to decide whether you are a supertaster. If you have a lot, the story goes, you taste bitter compounds more intensely than everybody else, which is why you hate broccoli. The test made it into textbooks, science-fair kits, and countless magazine articles about picky eaters. The test does not actually work. In 2014, Nicole Garneau and colleagues at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science ran the largest tongue-counting study anyone had ever tried, using citizen scientists to count papillae on nearly four hundred visitors and comparing the counts against sensitivity to the bitter chemical PROP. Their paper, in Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, reported that papillae density did not predict PROP bitterness at all. Not within the whole sample, not within any genetic subgroup, not among the people traditionally labelled supertasters. Some of the bitter sensitivity is real, and it is largely genetic. A gene called TAS2R38 controls one of the bitter receptors, and the version you inherit shapes how PROP tastes. The papillae story slipped in because the original studies were small and because counting bumps on a tongue is very easy to teach and photographs beautifully. Twenty years of blue dye did not survive one honest count. |
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Venice invented modern patent law and then almost everyone forgot |
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On March 19, 1474, the Senate of the Republic of Venice passed a short piece of legislation stating that anyone who invented a new and ingenious device in the city, and could make it actually work, would have exclusive rights to it for ten years. Copiers would be fined one hundred ducats and their machines destroyed. The state reserved the right to use the invention without paying, which is the world's first compulsory-licensing clause tucked inside a fifteenth-century law. It was the first general patent statute in world history, and it contains most of the ideas modern patent law still runs on: novelty, utility, disclosure, a fixed term, and enforcement in court. The Venetian secretaries copied it onto parchment and it sat quietly in the state archive for the next four hundred and sixty-two years, until an Italian legal historian named Giulio Mandich stumbled across it in 1936. |
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An American town you can only reach by driving through Canada |
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On July 29, 2020, a Landsat 8 satellite passed over an odd little peninsula and photographed a small piece of the United States only reachable by land through Canada. Point Roberts is five square miles of Washington State dangling below the forty-ninth parallel, and when the two nations drew that straight line across their shared map in 1846, the tip of this peninsula happened to land on the American side. About twelve hundred Americans live there. To get to any other American town, they drive north into Canada, across roughly twenty-five miles of British Columbia, and back into the United States at a different border checkpoint. When the pandemic closed the border in March 2020, the only grocery store nearly shut down, and Congress had to write letters to the Department of Homeland Security asking that Point Roberts be treated as a special case. |
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The Webb telescope keeps finding galaxies that should not exist yet |
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The James Webb Space Telescope keeps breaking its own record. In January 2026, an international team led by Rohan Naidu at MIT published a peer-reviewed confirmation in the Open Journal of Astrophysics of a galaxy called MoM-z14, whose spectrum places it about 280 million years after the big bang. That makes it, for now, the most distant object ever spectroscopically confirmed. The record itself is routine at this point. What has astronomers off-balance is what these early galaxies actually look like. Webb keeps finding them far brighter and more mature than the pre-launch models predicted. The first few hundred million years were supposed to be full of small, dim, chaotic proto-galaxies. Webb keeps showing them big, luminous ones instead. In the meantime, the telescope has already spotted candidates at redshifts of sixteen and eighteen, waiting for spectra. |
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The lawsuit that turned six downloads into four hundred thousand |
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A photographer named Kenneth Adelman spent 2002 flying a helicopter over the entire California coastline, snapping an aerial photograph every five hundred feet as part of a public archive documenting coastal erosion. He ended up with more than twelve thousand pictures. One of them incidentally showed Barbra Streisand's clifftop house in Malibu, buried in an unlabelled directory as image 3850. Before her lawyers noticed it, the photo had been downloaded six times. Two of those downloads had been by Streisand's own lawyers. In 2003, she sued Adelman for fifty million dollars for invasion of privacy. Within a month of the suit becoming news, the photo had been viewed roughly 420,000 times. She lost the case and was ordered to pay Adelman's legal fees. Two years later, a Techdirt writer named Mike Masnick gave the pattern a name and called it the Streisand effect. |
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The Point Roberts story is the one I'd retell at dinner. |
